The dirty palace

Roaming in the vast walls of the palace

The dusky light, the talus of black soil

spilling through broken masonry,

filth,

corridors that turn on themselves

or fork so ingeniously that I

am lost.

The orotund monster—eyes clicking,

fat hands, reeking of sweat

and floor polish,

And soil—stands above me.

I look up and see a little slit

spilling out the dark,

that gets on me get it

off me

get it off

me.

A level place opens up

behind some soiled curtains

where altar boys store their robes,

where actors have left their props:

paper swords, a stroller on its side.

But no mops or rags.

I can’t remember

where I came from or

remember how I got here.

Or how I got so soiled

or so lost.

Music is the space between notes

Like a synapse between neurons
and when I was young, electric guitars

sparked across that gap,
and lit undiscovered

places in me.

but the jerks that played them

used their juice to shout me down,

so I switched to classical.

Sometimes, I could sense

a balance in my wise fingers

and in the true strings,

in good and solid wood

a slum-dwelling trouvere,

producing “ravishing divisions”

or quiet in the noise around me. 

But now I was a father.
I never had two minutes to play.

Son’s asleep so I get out my guitar
He wakes up.

Asleep, awake, and my guitar feels like

a broken love affair,
or some little bit of my soul

going out of tune. And one day

it all rushes from my gut:

my shitty job, rundown apartment,

my faltering love.

And anger clipped my tongue in two

my mouth filled with scalding liquid

and I spewed it out in my son’s face.

His limbs pulled up in an awful spasm

at power he’d never felt before.

In his face I saw

his animal spirits twitch

Like an amputated leg

run through with electricity

or like an unbalanced guitar string

that should be true, that should be fine

but now plucked by an unwise force

out of all semblance of accord.

Empty shoe

I found the running shoe by the side of the path
in last year's mast and rotting leaves.
The tongue lolled and its eyelets gaped,
empty. Soleless, the foot that gave it
shape had run on without it.

Cane

The crippled assassin kept a sword in the lower half of his two-part cane, and he sometimes fondled the rose some craftsman had figured in its Malacca wood. He could store a shot of liquor in the flask hidden in the cane's handle, but the assassin preferred to lop the tip from his latest target’s little finger and enshrine it, briefly, there. Sometimes he’d show the grisly trophy—maybe to seduce, perhaps to terrorize.

The last time he did this his potential lover, or possible victim, pulled out a gun and shot through that fragile relic into the assassin's eye where a rose-like pattern oozed into the sclera. Did his other eye register surprise?

No one knows who recovered the cane, but the sword, now separated from its scabbard, was lost when its owner’s boat capsized in a hurricane, a killer storm that swirled around its still center, like the bloom of a rose that folds around nothing.

Angel

With an awful slap, he fell to earth.

His wings would splay about him,

But he’s just a piece of flesh

Like you or me.

And he pressed into the earth,

Moldering to what he was:

Alien, but made of dust,

Like you or me.

The Ship Sets Sail

The racket in the port,

The canned music and feckless warnings,

I blow them off like people do

And climb up a gangplank.

The decks are smeared with offal.

Stewards ignore us.

Banshees crawl on the stanchions.

Besuited gremlins punch a hole in the hull.

The water that pours in

Makes a shitty drink.

The ship—complacent, majestic—wallows,

Spilling the passengers,

Conjured or screaming, into salty water,

And drags us down in its filthy wake.

The Bike Lesson

In bankrupt Dublin, I discovered that El had never learned to ride a bike. An immaterial deficiency except that El was being wooed by a rich English banker,  in Ireland to glut on the financial ruin about us, a scavenger smelling carrion. But even vultures take respite after gorging, and he discharged his spare time by teaching an American student how to handle a bicycle.

El was sweet, and pretty in a half-formed way, an amalgam of child and woman. And maybe the banker, crammed on Euros, could now see that inchoate poetry. There must be poetry even for a buzzard.

But we left Dublin and the millionaire, and settled on Inis Mor, where I took time to continue developing El's cycling skills, showing her how to do this difficult thing, sharing with her, like an attractively competent paramour. And as I ran beside her I remembered when my dad taught me how to ride a bike, pacing me until momentum and confidence had melded into a flashing alloy of flesh and metal, letting me go until I was, if not flying, as close as we get to it in this mortal world.

So I ran alongside my almost child and, though featherless and earth-bound, we whirled on beyond the vultures' gyre. And shortly afterward, at one with her career, she rode out of sight.

Music

What should I do, music? Should I love you, or cultivate your wine-grape mountains, or wander above the tree line in your ascetic airs, or sink into ocean depths, moss-grown, with wrack and gravel. Drunk on salt water I sway like sea weeds, almost somnolent.

Am I like music? Why listen to me? After all what I want to say might only have tongues or eyes, lithe patterns writhing about. Only beautiful limbs, swaying like weeds in salty water.